My Dad called to tell me he’d cremated a writer. “A pretty famous one,” he said. “Grace something. Your mother knew her.”
“Not Grace Paley.”
“That’s the one.”
I tapped the edge of my laptop. I was in the library at my college, buzzed on caffeine, and already bored with this conversation. I didn’t believe him. Cremating Grace Paley was a fitting combination of things my father might lie about: my mother, and the things she and I shared that he didn’t understand.
My mother and I read Paley’s short-story collections cover to cover, passing them back and forth and reciting our favorite sentences. “The little disturbances of man!” we’d cry over a minor inconvenience. We adored Paley’s New York toughness, her wit. My mother had been a part of the radical movements of the sixties, and we admired that Paley spent as much time at protests as she did at the writing desk. We’d quote the opening of “An Interest in Life”: “My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn’t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.” When my mother found a wad of hair in the vacuum cleaner, or got slighted at work, she’d mutter, “No one can tell me it was meant kindly.” I understand now that one source of my mother’s bitterness was hidden in plain sight: the first two words of that story.
“Sure, Dad,” I said. Of all the lies my father told, this wasn’t his worst. It was a nice fiction with a ring of truth that the best lies have: Paley had moved from New York to Vermont, and she’d died that year.
Three years prior, when I was still in high school, my father had started a cremation company—only the latest in a series of business ideas he’d floated over the years. Before that, he’d dreamed of a “snake oil medicine wagon” that travels to flea markets; of blessing rocks to “sell to rich people on their wedding days”; of street performances in a fedora under the name Jimmy Wonderful. But the cremation idea actually took off. Within six months he was driving a minivan-cum-hearse around southern Vermont, picking up bodies on a gurney he’d found online. He bought a crematory retort on credit and set it up in a rickety, prefab building at the edge of our neighbor’s dairy farm, sitting up nights in a La-Z-Boy while the machine burned beside him.
If there was anything I had learned from my dad by the time he opened the business, it was how to feel certain that whatever came out of your mouth was close enough to the truth, so long as you believed it. It was a pleasure to me, this artful lying, and it slid into place alongside my voracious reading, my budding desire to be a novelist. You could make things up that actually felt more like truth, somehow. You could build a world so precise that other people started to believe it, too. And if you didn’t believe the things my dad said, he’d find a way to make you.
When I was a child, he seemed to me like someone whose life had roiled with adventure and near misses. He told stories full of verbal embroidery that always made us laugh. At first.
One story: My grandfather had experienced a mental break in his fifties so profound that he’d tried to drive his family off a road. He was committed to a mental institution, and when they visited him the next day, they swore his hair had turned white overnight. At the time I didn’t know anything about the genetics of mental illness, and this nightmare transformation seemed more like a myth: a madcap danger my father and his siblings had luckily escaped.
Another story: When my father was a boy, a rich friend of his told him about a family looking to hire someone to sail their boat along the East Coast for the summer. My father, who’d never been on a boat, purchased the outfit he imagined people who sailed yachts might wear: crisp white pants, a navy blazer with gold buttons, loafers. When he showed up at the dock, it was immediately clear he’d miscalculated: The rich people were wearing rubber boots, holey fisherman sweaters. When they asked how long he’d been sailing, he lied without hesitation. He lied as he climbed up onto the deck, lied as he tugged at the ropes, and all the way out to sea, where he promptly let the boom swing around so quickly he almost decapitated the matriarch.
Not everyone would imagine they could get away with a lie so blatant. There have been times when this quality in my father has broken my heart. There have been other times when I almost admire it. If it could just be a glorious bit of storytelling, that might be one thing. But it always seems to end with someone ducking for cover. Someone wondering if they might have almost lost their head.
Sometimes I wonder if I have lied—to myself, to others—about how bad things got because I didn’t want to believe it. It was easier to turn it all into a joke. As long as you’re laughing, after all, things can’t be so bad.
What I’m saying is, when I talk about my father, no matter how I intend to start, a joke comes out. Have you heard the one about him showing up at the doorstep of every apartment my mother lived in after their divorce, demanding to be let in? Have you heard the one about her running to her car and calling the cops—how, just before she hung up, she warned them he might have a gun? Have you heard the one about how he screamed that he would kill her son? Ha! Ha! Ha!
If I stop joking, I discover I have no idea how to describe him. No matter what, you’ll get the wrong impression. He’s different from different angles. He can be charming. He remembers your name and uses it in conversation. He bends his head low to be sure he hears you. He insists on paying for everyone’s dinner. He likes to make people laugh. He almost always can.
He had enemies when I was growing up: a lawyer who’d refused to pay him on time, a judge who ruled against my sister in a traffic case, any of my mother’s friends from the hippie days, my brother. He was always writing letters, leaving voicemails. He imagined himself like the men in the movies and shows he loved: Vito Corleone, Tony Soprano.
He got lost in little battles that were enormous in his imagination. An entire winter and spring were consumed by his campaign to make voting at our annual town meeting anonymous—something known as an “Australian ballot.” Somehow, under my father’s steering, this initially reasonable campaign came to include him cursing at people who had been family friends for years. For weeks before the town meeting he stood on the side of the highway in an Uncle Sam hat and beard, wearing a sandwich board that said Australian ballot now, and he went way over his time limit during the proposal at the meeting, insisting on performing an entire a cappella rap (“democracy, not hypocrisy”). He was so polarizing that people voted against the initiative without even understanding it. When we walked out of the school gymnasium after the vote, a neighbor said something to him from the driver’s seat of his car, and he reached inside, grasped the man’s shirt, and tried to pull him out of the window. Dad slept for days afterward, crashed into oblivion.
He kept a closet full of costumes: an Elvis jumpsuit; a bejeweled red, white, and blue cape; that Uncle Sam beard; a priest’s collar; a bespoke wool vest that he thought he could wear one day if he were ever cast as an extra in a Western. He fantasized about going into acting. Maybe he’d always been meant to be an actor. Things would have made more sense if he had. He talked like a lawyer and grew angry when anyone reminded him he was not, in fact, a lawyer. He seemed to believe he could become anyone he wanted to be. After all, he’d done it before.
When I was in high school and college, I obliged anyone who wanted to hear a joke about being raised by spooky undertakers. There was no shortage of creepy details: catalogs in our bathroom that advertised the things you could do with your ashes, cardboard coffins stacked high in the barn by the rifle targets and clay pigeons, an industrial blender beside the retort for grinding heavy clumps of bone into a finer silt.
Or how about this fact: When a human body is cremated, the machine heats to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, so hot that the body combusts—not an explosion, but almost an evaporation. After two hours the machine shudders off, and someone (my father) slides open the silver door. Inside are ashes in the shape of a human body. You can see the arms, the legs, the head—and, sometimes, almost the faint outline of fingers. I saw it once, visiting my father at work.
Even I could grow quiet, reaching for a joke about those things and finding nothing. Maybe it was how silent it was in that weird little house where my father burned bodies, still as a waiting room. You couldn’t even hear the highway.
The truth is, in the years when my father was an undertaker, he was at his most gentle, his most attuned to others. Prone to bouts of mania and depression, he now seemed driven by new purpose. He started wearing a beeper, the sound of which we grew used to: Whenever the alarm rang out, we knew someone had died. My father showed up at people’s houses in the middle of the night to carry a body to his car, and the first thing he said to the people he met was “I’m on your schedule.” He never rushed them. He let one family build a bonfire in our yard while they waited for their son to be cremated. He built a stone wall along the entrance to the crematorium entirely by hand, with rocks he rolled out of the woods.
I saw women hug my father when he got out of the car with their husbands’ ashes. I saw people run from him in the grocery store: the angel of death. Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering has a description of the undertaker that has always stayed with me. “He is the person who comes after you have seen the worst thing,” she writes. “He is the rest of my life.”
My father, the reinventor, always fiddling in the laboratory to make a new self. Over the years he had transformed himself—to varying degrees of success—into a sailor, a stonemason, a slick-haired corporate consultant. And yet when he became an undertaker, a layer fell away. I saw more of him than ever before.
But those years didn’t last. When the undertaker-self crumbled, when his marriage crumbled, he shrank into our now-empty house like a crab into a shell. For a while his old friends kept him connected and even occasionally laughing, but then his best friend died and then the dog died and then he moved into an RV and drove it into the desert. He became harder to get hold of. When we did talk, it was increasingly difficult to penetrate whatever stories he was telling himself, stories in which he had never hurt my mother, in fact, she had hurt him, and Donald Trump had some pretty valid points after all, and it’s common knowledge that feminists are misandrists, and I never called him, what kind of daughter was I, and who did my husband and I think we were, we didn’t even watch the Red Sox, we were turning into coastal elites, and Colin Kaepernick didn’t understand anything about military service, and after all that he had done for me, what kind of piece of shit—
The attacks he’d once visited on his so-called enemies moved closer to home, eventually including me and my husband, until it was impossible to keep him close. If a father is someone who loves you unconditionally, I have not had a father in years.
Once, when I was seventeen, I was driving my mother to work. Looking out the window, she sighed, “Maybe you just get used to it. Like fleas on a dog.” She was talking about her marriage. It was the most direct she’d ever been on the topic.
The year before that, she’d asked me to drive to my brother’s house and look through his mailbox for a letter my father had sent him. We share a mom, not a dad, and while my father had once been a loving stepdad, a few years back some perceived slight had tipped him down a spiral that eventually became a full-blown war against my brother. It was the worst yet of my father’s scorched-earth campaigns.
I did what my mother asked, then threw the letter in the furnace without opening it, heart pounding. I found out later it barely mattered. My father had already written him dozens of letters, each worse than the last. The only difference is that this was the one time my mom acknowledged explicitly what it had felt like for years: that we had to trick my dad to keep him from hurting us, or others. We had to lie to him, or bad things would happen.
The hardest part of describing those years is how we found ways to talk around it: Things happened, and then we’d find a clever turn of phrase to describe them, when we might have said, No. Or, Stop. My father threatened violence, and my mother laughed.
He seemed as big as a planet—a celestial body whose gravity determined our orbits. I was a child, but I still don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for the way I huddled in his shadow, copied his movements. For the ways I thought this would keep me safe.
Over the years many people have attempted a secondhand diagnosis: He was manic-depressive, maybe, or borderline personality disorder, or, or. I guess it’s possible there’s a pill that would make him more like other dads. It’s possible there’s a medical name for the wall between him and the world, which grows taller every day. I have no easy answers.
A few years ago I was rereading Paley’s short-story collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and remembered my dad’s claim about cremating her. I told it to one of my friends as a joke: You heard that one about how my dad was convinced he’d cremated one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century? That night, when I called my mom for our usual chat, I repeated it to her.
She didn’t laugh. “Actually,” she said, “that’s true.”
It’s possible I’ve gotten more than one thing wrong about him. Just because a truth exists doesn’t mean I can understand every facet of it. Some of his lies, after all, had become the walls we lived within, real as brick. One little truth had gotten in, I thought. So what.
In the years after we stopped talking, I began doing street outreach, spending Fridays sitting out in the wind talking to old men who were living outside, usually in tents. They weren’t all old men, of course, but many were. We talked about weather, birds, traffic, dental care. Every so often we talked about their daughters. I sometimes wondered if, somewhere else in America, another woman—a waitress, or a gas station attendant, or a girl in a waiting room—was talking to my father.
I didn’t feel about these men the way I felt about my father. I could talk to them. They reminded me of what I used to love about being with him but with none of the baggage. These men couldn’t betray me. I wasn’t their daughter.
But it was more than that. As I met people who’d been doing street outreach for much longer, who’d been organizing for affordable housing and vouchers and rent control, something happened to my political nerve, to how I saw the world—something about how people sat beside each other on the curb to have a cigarette or drink a bottle of water and talk to each other. How we listened. All my reading and political study and community meetings and righteous leftist indignation boiled down to this: If you can listen, you can be interested. If you can be interested, you can organize.
I was interested in the people I met during street outreach, the people I organized with, the neighbors in community meetings, even the politicians we railed against. I was interested in the kinds of worlds those people imagined, for themselves and others, and how they told stories about that world. I’m interested in the people I love, and I’m interested in what it takes to tell them the truth so that I am known, exactly as I am, in this lifetime.
In what would turn out to be our last conversation, my father and I walked along the National Mall. I was taking him to see the monuments. We were getting along so well that he exclaimed, “You know, I’m finally going to do it. I’m going to pay for your mother to travel to China. She always wanted to go.”
I smiled and nodded, desperate to think my father had undergone some spiritual transformation. But something didn’t fit. It took me a few minutes, but I realized: This was a man who’d spent almost a decade sending my mother harassing texts and letters, calling so much she turned her phone off, showing up at her friends’ houses to bang at the door, threatening her family. There was no world—no real world—in which it would be OK for him to pay for a trip for her like they were old friends. Not to mention: There was no way he had the money.
The next morning he pulled an abrupt 180, leaving my husband an outrageous, threatening voicemail. It was the first time it had struck me that my father could make up a world, just as I could, but I didn’t have to live in his.
We haven’t seen each other since. I miss him. Anyone who has cut off a parent knows it’s not the simple relief you might hope for. By the end, there was so little I believed was real about him. But when I miss him, I miss the way he could make a stranger laugh, landing right on the punch line. When it didn’t matter if the story was true or not.
